Identifying Communication Filters

In promotion of the release of the Peanuts Movie two years ago, 20th Century Fox put a voice-changing machine on their website where you could record and phrase and it would convert it to sound like the “wha, wha, wha” voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher. I’d link the page here, but sadly they have taken it down.

“They” is the Problem?

I assumed for many years that my inability to connect with or understand what other people were saying was due to their struggle to articulate clearly or at least coherently. As I’ve gained better self-awareness, I’ve come to realize the presence and deployment of filters which are making my understanding of certain people unclear or indistinct… wha, wha, wha wha. Here are the filters I’ve recognized; perhaps you’ll detect a familiar sound:

Low expectation – Low attention filter

When my conversations with people in the past have been less than stimulating or helpful, I found that I entered new opportunities to interact with them with an, “I’m-going-to-be-polite-and-pretend-to-listen-but-not-really-listen” filter. I smiled, nodded and threw in an occasional “good” or “uh-huh,” but I honestly could not tell you what they said 2 minutes later. I blamed them for not bringing more to the table, but at some point, I had to ask myself if that was just an excuse for not paying attention. As I removed that filter and improved my listening skills, I found that I gained good insight into the cultural temperature of our organization through conversations with people whom I had categorized as not having much to offer.

Blocking filter for a high frequency or excessive volume

As an introvert who likes a methodical and process-based approach to life, I found that I prepared myself with a muting filter for the people who hit me with high energy (talking fast and loud, or emotionally charged). I pulled those conversations out of private spaces to attract other people to act as buffers and dissipate the energy. The tactics worked, but my focus was centered on mitigation of the intensity rather than on the issues they were trying to convey. In order to remove the filter and really listen to this type of communicator, I had to negotiate with them about the energy level, “Can we slow down just a bit and have a quieter conversation?” And I had to learn to tolerate a higher level of intensity than I liked which then allowed me to hear the content I had been filtering out.

Gender and age filter

Issues with my upbringing surfaced unnoticeably to me whenever females adopted a maternal tone or asked too many worry-based questions. It was hard to detect, because I did not have a bias filter for listening females as an entire group. It was the same way with people older than me or younger; the filter was selective. I had to pay closer attention to the triggers that disconnected me from conversations and reduced their words to indistinguishable, “wha, wha, blah, blah, blah.” My triggers were the two I’ve already noted (a maternal tone and worry-based questions), and egocentric or self-selling communication. I’ve found that this filter is the most difficult to remove and persists as an ongoing process, but identifying the triggers for deploying it is helping considerably. By the way, the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher was created using a trombone with a rubber mute that was moved in and out of the bell. Who have you been tuning out, filtering or muting… and why?